Well, this is an outrage. There are just some things you shouldn’t mess with. Roast dinners. The national anthem. The John Lewis Christmas advert.
You see, the John Lewis Christmas advert has long operated on a perfect formula. Every November we are treated to a sumptuous mini-movie, the components of which have long since lapsed into tradition. It must be festive. It must have a slowed down piano ballad cover version of a nostalgic pop song. It must also be unfathomably sad, either because it’s about an old man dying of loneliness on the moon (2015) or a Christmas tree being banished to the garden because it’s a bit too excitable (2023).
But most importantly – most importantly of all – it must not be about John Lewis. The whole point of a John Lewis Christmas advert is that, if people watch it out of context and are subsequently asked what it is advertising, they should ideally reply ‘palliative care’ or ‘some sort of childhood trauma charity’. The point of a John Lewis Christmas advert is that a foreigner should be able to watch it all the way through and still have no idea what John Lewis is or why his kink is making people from Surrey cry.
But forget that this year. Because this year, John Lewis has thrown all that in the bin. This year, John Lewis has committed the unforgivable sin of literally setting its Christmas advert inside an actual branch of John Lewis. This is quite frankly unforgivable.
The plot of this year’s John Lewis ad is as follows: a woman goes shopping in the big Oxford Street John Lewis because she wants to buy her sister a present, at which point she falls into a twee flashback Narnia where she revisits her sister at various moments during her life to try to figure out what to buy her. Conveniently, all of these memories directly correlate with a different John Lewis department. There’s the memory about jewellery. There’s the memory about furniture. There’s the moment where the sisters tearfully reconnect after a period of estrangement, which it turns out is actually a memory about scarves.
Disgusting, isn’t it? John Lewis seems to be under the impression that the point of a television commercial is to say ‘Hello, we’re a shop. You can buy things here’. Which – and I cannot overstate this enough – it is not. The point of a television commercial, as John Lewis has made perfectly clear in the past, is to be prestigious and abstract, and convince the most insufferable people on social media to post performative messages about how much it made them cry. Everyone knows that.
But oh no. Apparently John Lewis has now got it into its head that it should remind us that it’s a functioning business with staff and branches and stock. What sort of wild reasoning is this?
I must also take issue with the music this year. The soundtrack to the John Lewis Christmas advert is Sonnet by the Verve. Not a slowed down version of Sonnet by the Verve. Not a version of Sonnet by the Verve played on a child’s toy piano and sung by a wan, tuberculosis-ridden Victorian girl like in every other John Lewis Christmas advert since the dawn of time. No, it’s literally just Sonnet by the Verve, like someone at John Lewis just taped it off the radio or something. What’s the point of that?
Honestly, it’s a good job nobody watches television any more, because it means people will only see this in the form of a skippable YouTube preroll ad, and it’ll quite frankly save John Lewis a lot of embarrassment. A Christmas advert about commerce? That not only shows people the things it sells but what the inside of its shops look like? It will never catch on.
I’m working really hard to salvage this one. Maybe the woman in the shop isn’t thinking about her sister at all. Maybe she tripped forward and hit her head on a clothing rail, and what we’re actually seeing is her life flashing before her eyes as she slowly bleeds out. That’s better, isn’t it? That’s a bit more John Lewisy.
And yet I fear this isn’t the case. It really is just an advert about a woman going to a shop and doing some shopping. Let’s write this one off as a misstep, shall we? Next year, let’s have something more traditional please. Let’s have an advert about a boy with a broken leg, or a dog that’s been hit by a car, or a physical manifestation of the concept of bereavement. You know, like the old days. After all, Christmas isn’t Christmas until you’ve been bummed out by a shop.
